Twitter Presentation

I gave a presentation at Twitter today. I was invited there by David Loftesness, whom I went to school with, and to my non-surprise, saw a number of ex-googlers there. Twitter had just been through a reorganization, and had been through massive growth over the last year. I was hence asked to talk about challenges in scaling engineering during hyper-growth, which was a topic that coincided with my next book, so I was happy to do. Because I wanted to be really open during the talk and provide lots of juicy details, I asked for the talk not to be recorded and also for the juicy bits not to be twittered. Below is the mostly sanitized version of the talk.

Twitter employees asked really good questions, and in more than one case challenged the presentation. This is what I expect from really smart people, and I was also very impressed by the turnout. All in all, I really enjoyed giving the talk and getting difficult questions. One of the tough ones was why I wasn't using twitter more. Well, I'm going to try to use it more, and you can follow me @choonpiaw.

After the talk, I met with one of the co-founders of Vayable, who had requested a meeting with me. It's one of the more interesting travel startups I've heard of recently, and it turned out that we knew many folks in common. There seems to be no shortage of interesting ideas, though as usual, execution is everything!

For those who are interested, I'll be giving a similar talk at Dropbox next week.